To Storm Heaven - Esther Friesner [2]
In dreams she was young again, a maiden herself, a girl whose brilliant golden eyes ensnared half a dozen suitors. She was sitting on the steps of the village shrine to the Six Mothers, whispering delicious secrets with her girlfriends—Dead now, all long since dead! a wraith of reality moaned through the dream— when a shepherd came by, down from the mountainside, and the girls paused in their chatter to tease the lad. Like all shepherds, he was slow witted, with hardly more brains than the beast that led his flock.
Everyone made fun of the shepherds, no one thought anything wrong about doing so, and the shepherds themselves lacked the intelligence to understand that they were being ridiculed.
But something was wrong: This shepherd understood. He heard the dream-young Se’ar’s taunts and scowled darkly at her. She was taken aback for an instant, then shrugged her misgivings aside. He can’t possibly understand. t she thought. He’s only a shepherd. Ma says if you give one of them a piece of bread, he’ll be as likely to stick it in his ear as in his mouth.
No hurt’s possible where there’s no wit to mind what’s said. Having reassured herself, she launched another verbal barb at the lad, and capped it with a rude gesture with both hands.
But she was wrong. He did understand. He let out a roar of anger and leaped for her, siezing her by the shoulders and shaking her while her girlfriends fled screaming.
She wanted to scream too, but she was helpless, voiceless. Her captor shook her harder, harder still, until she fell down and her teeth chattered together and her head banged against the steps of the Six Mothers’ shrine. She could still hear her girlfriends screaming, only now their screams had turned into her name, shouted over and over while the enraged shepherd tried to batter the life out of her bones.
“Se’ar! Mother Se’ar!” She snapped back into the waking world, a hand on her shoulder shaking her, but gently. She looked up’ into the broad, bland face of Kinryk, the innkeeper’s son, and what she saw there made her forget to breathe. Easygoing Kinryk, lazy Kinryk, slack-faced Kinryk who everyone said was only a half step off from shepherdhood himself, this same Kinryk had become transformed. His whole face was alight, radiant with bliss, and his squat, flabby body quivered with the effort of trying to contain some astonishing piece of news.
“She’s gone!” he gasped. “Oh, Mother Se’ar, I was there. I saw it myself. She’s gone! She’s been taken!” “Who?” A veil of shadow passed over the old woman’s eyes, the sign that always visited her when she knew that a death was coming to the village. She knew: “Ma’adrys.” It was a whisper, like a fall of pebbles into one of the mountain crevasses.
She went to gather flowers to sweeten my sickroom, Se’ar thought. Avrenk meadow. The main track up that side of the mountain ‘s fine, but the shortcutk still half gullied out by the winter storms. She wouM take the shortcut, my wiM one, in a rush to come back to tend me, and now— “Have they… fetched her body?” The old woman tried to sit up, her thoughts roiling. Taken so young, poor unlucky orphan. No man’s child, a mad mother’s daughter. Ay.t As if a hard life were the fee to let us purchase the hour of our death./Lady, in mercy give me back only a handful of my oM strength. Let me see to the proper arraying of her corpse. She gathered breath with a great effort and panted, “Thatmthat box by the hearth, My wedding dress. She shall have it for— for her burial. Take it. Take it andreand bring it to—” Kinryk laughed as if Se’ar had told him the best jest in all the world. “Dress, Mother Se’ar? Ma’adrys needs no dress where’s she’s gone. I saw them take her, the shining ones, and the light almost blinded me, but when I got my eyes back I saw her clothes left there in the grass, all in a muddle. No need for any but the robes of star and sunlight where she dwells now.” Se’ar’s almost toothless mouth gaped. What was all this gabble? Some of the village wags must have put the boy up